How to create unbreakable Permalinks

Recently a lovely, blogging friend of mine set up an emergency call. She had posted 2 blog-articles in a row, but when clicking on the permalink, it said: “Error 404 – page not found”. For sure she was in panic.

What happened?

She had set up articles with special characters.

For a German WordPress setup even a ‘ is a special character.

How to fix the permalink?
How to change a permalink?

Fixing the link is the same as changing the link. Sometimes our blogposts have bombastic titles, but we want to have them also a bit more SEO-friendly.

So “Add the new post”, add the title and then change it!

Usually the system adopts the title of the post as part of the permalink.

Click “Edit” right underneath the title-line.

Enter your new title … you don’t have to add the hyphens, wordpress will do it for you.

Confirm via ok and it is done.

What to do when I realize the mess after I have published the article?

Don’t worry.

You can always edit your article, but you can also do a quick edit to fix the permalink or change the title.

Go to your dashboard and choose “All posts”

You will get an overview of all your posts including those you have scheduled for future.

Hover over the post title and you will find that you can chose between “Edit” = opens the whole article, “Quick Edit” = opens a little panel, “Trash” = moves your article to trash, “View” = shows the article the way the reader sees it.

Click “Quick Edit”.

Underneath the title you will find a section called “Slag” … this is where you will add your new title line for the permalink.
You can also change the categories, the tags, publishing date or the author of a post, if your blog has multiple authors.

Don’t forget to confirm with “Update” … all well now, all done.

Happy title changing!

Do you have other problems with your blog / WordPress installation? Let me know with a comment, I will search for a solution!